Every beginner starts their journey in web development learning frontend part, backend part, and some tools which are important to build the web project. Building your first project on your own after so many struggles is an exciting feeling for the beginners. You start having a lot of expectations from your job but when you enter the industry you find that your expectations are not even close to the real situation.
You learn a lot of new things in your job such as how to debug the code, how to work on someone else code, how to write clean code, how to refactor your code and how to search the things on your own and build the feature. Well learning these things help grow as a developer. Here we are going to discuss these things which are good to know before you start your career in web development. It will help you to manage your expectations and it will set you on the right path.
1. A Degree is not Just the Option to Enter in Programming
If you want to make a career in programming or web development college degree is not just the only option to enter this field. There are so many resources available on the internet that can teach you coding from the basics. You can take the help of youtube videos, StackOverflow, learning websites to teach yourself programming. Even kids are learning to code and building their websites and apps taking the help of these resources. So you can also become a self-taught developer taking advantage of these resources.
2. You will Google Things a Lot
Working on real-world projects in industries will teach you the most important skills in programming i.e. Googling. You can save a lot of time if you know how and what to google to find a solution for a creating problem and to fix some specific issue. Also, remember that it’s totally fine if you are taking the help of Google to find out the solution. It’s a sign of being a smart developer and not a bad developer.
3. You Can’t Learn Everything
A lot of newbie developers get attracted to shiny tools, technology, and frameworks. They listen from here and there that this language or that framework is popular and then they try to learn everything which is a wrong decision. Understand that you can’t learn everything. Companies (domain-specific) are looking for the people who know the tech stack company is working with. Every company works in different languages and different frameworks so decide which company you want to work with and focus on learning that specific language. Another option is to choose a specific language or framework to learn and find the companies that are working on the same language or tech stack.
4. Writing an Easy Code is More Important than Writing Fancy Code
A lot of developers try to write fancy or complex code just for the show off how well they can code. Understand that it’s important to keep your code simple. A simple and clean code is always easy to understand and easy to modify. When other developers have to work on someone else code they always expect to work on simple and easy to understand code.
5. Developers are Lazy in Doing Proper Testing
A lot of developers are lazy and don’t enjoy the proper testing of the module in their job. It also happens that if there is a deadline mentioned for developers then they try to build the module first and sacrifice a few testing in their project.
6. A Specific Time Estimation Not Always Works
In development when sometimes you need to build a feature or module you think that it will take just 3-4 hours because it looks simple but in some cases when you start working on that feature you realize that your project flow doesn’t allow you to get this little feature work. In that case either you need to make some modifications in another part or you need to restructure a big part of the application to get this little feature to work.
7. You will Laugh Looking at Your Own Old Code
When beginners enter into development or programming they write a lot of messy code. They just really want to fix the things and if the code works, it’s fine. They consider that working software is good software so they first give priority to making things work. After a couple of years as an experienced developer, they laugh and they feel ashamed looking at their spaghetti code. They start thinking that “how can I write such a messy code?” but later they smile and realize how far they have come as a developer. Now they also understand that good software is not just about making things work.
8. Fixing the Bug is a Time-Consuming Process
It’s easy to spot a beginner in development the way they try to fix the bug and build an application. In development writing, bug-free code is impossible for newbie developers. They take a lot of time to fix the bugs and the reason why it happens is “they don’t know where to look and what to look for?”. Slowly once they start understanding the flow of a project and some debugging technique they get better at fixing the bug.
9. You Will Face Imposter Syndrome
Your coworkers are talking about some cool and new technology but you don’t get it. You agree with their conversation but the reality is you didn’t understand what they are talking about. You also find that writing a new feature is difficult in your code because you don’t know half of the technology. You think that you don’t fit in your job role, you start having self-doubt and you feel like an imposter. Well, not only beginners get these feelings but also experienced developers have to deal with it. Initially, imposter syndrome makes someone very uncomfortable but later with experience, you become habitual of it and you become comfortable with getting this uncomfortable feeling all the time. Read this article: Imposter Syndrome In Software Developers
10. You Can’t Memorize Everything
Memorizing each tag of HTML or syntax of your programming language is not a good idea in development. Beginners make this mistake a lot and their progress becomes slow. Understand that you don’t need to memorize everything. If you don’t know something then google it and use it. Syntax eventually gets clicked in your brain after some experience in working on the same language and writing the same code multiple times.
11. You Need to Be a Good Problem Solver
This is one of the most important things every newbie programmer should consider in development. Your problem-solving technique is much more important and valuable for a company. You will be paid to solve the problems not to write a thousand lines of code. A good developer needs to be creative and they need to find out the best solution to build a feature or to fix a certain problem. You will find multiple solutions for a single problem so now you need to use your creativity to solve problems easily and effectively.
12. You will Be Reading a Lot
You will be spending a lot of time reading about new technology, tools, and best practices. You will be spending time staying up to date with the things happening in the industry. What technologies or frameworks are popular in the industry, how to use that and for what kind of application it is suitable for. It will also help you in getting the other job opportunities and upgrading your skills.
13. Responsiveness Can be Frustrating
It’s not easy for developers to make the application look good and awesome for all screen size devices. Making an application responsive to all kinds of devices is really a pain for developers. There are so many different devices and browsers, there is always a combination of a browser and device that doesn’t look great. You will be fixing these issues a lot using media queries and other techniques.
